Game Prep for Canon: The Card Game

I have a love-hate relationship with games. I love having a common recreational activity to do with people that involves wits, brains, and a fun theme. I absolutely HATE learning the rules. I am not the kind of person who can just start playing and figure out as they go. I want to understand the rules and have adequate to think and ask questions. As you can imagine, this means I have quite a few unplayed games at my house. They all just sit there initial “one day…”

As summer comes to a close, I’m running short on one-days. But as I turn renewed attention to my book, my teaching, and the issues that keep up at night, I am very interested in getting around to one game on my proverbial shelf: Dr. James McGrath’s Canon: The Card Game.

McGrath is Clarence L. Goodwin Chair in New Testament Language and Literature at Butler University. He’s a fixture in the blogosphere with some serious bone fides in games, sci-fi, and fantasy.

I want to say that he created this card game ten years ago as a way of helping students think through the politics and processes of canon both in contemporary fandoms, ancient Jewish groups, and formative Christian collectives. Not only have I meant to play it, but I haven’t even ordered it. That changes today.

I’m thinking a lot about canon right now and am interested in some of the ideas explored in the game. Games might strike some people as a strange way to think through scholarly ideas, but I don’t think they are nearly as out of pocket as you may imagine.

I remember playing through Horace Miner’s “Body Rituals of the Nacirema” and David Macaulay’s “Hotel of Mysteries” in my undergraduate anthropology courses. A lot of my colleagues use them religious studies courses to this day. Then I have a class activity called Theory Throw Down, a card game I use to introduce students to social theory in religious studies.

Games—or interactive media— are an extremely lucrative industry right now. Board games and tabletop role playing games have never been more popular. Trading card games are basically bullion (next time you’re in a gas station, ask yourself why they sell Pokémon cards). Video games—or interactive media as they’ve come to be called—are so mainstream that schools have teams and colleges will even give scholarships for the best players.

All this to say, games are serious business.

I’m interested in finally getting around to see how McGrath’s game helps us think about the finer points of canon.